


a bramble rose by any other name

by ladymemebeth



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Character Study, Female Sexuality, Girlhood, Meta, Other, donna tartt write a complex female character challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 05:12:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15065882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymemebeth/pseuds/ladymemebeth
Summary: some angry and abstract (?) meta on the injustice of camilla macaulay's characterization inthe secret history,with mentions of other characters who fit a similar archetype.





	a bramble rose by any other name

**Author's Note:**

> this is an excerpt from a much longer piece about the trope of mysterious girlhood in media which has vexed me from a young age. hopefully it makes sense out of context! 
> 
> cw for blood, implications of sexual violence/suicide

_"She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine."_

Camilla watched the blood slide out from between the two planes of flesh on the underside of her foot and I wonder if her mind went blank for just one blissful moment and she thought of absolutely nothing — before Charles turned away and Francis knelt beside her to dig out the glass and Henry carried her limp body back to the house and Richard watched, silent and stupid. Before any of that. Or did Camilla think of everything in that one moment, of every sorry thing in her sorry life that led to the instance in which the shard of glass breached the skin of her foot, in which the wrong end of the cigarette sank into her forearm? Surely it was nothing that she thought of, nothing that ran through her mind beneath the fine blond boyish hair on her delicate head, nothing that coursed through the veins in her thankless throat, nothing that could have moved her to tears or to laughter. There was a time in my life where I would have given anything to be such a creature, bleeding out on the grass in front of an adoring audience. I didn’t want to be known, or loved; I wanted to be desired with such a force that it would hurt a man to look at me. I didn’t want to be a woman; I wanted to be a fictional girl: oh, wow, lovely.

I wonder if she could feel her pulse under her eye the way I sometimes do and whether this soft flutter of muscle matched the spray of crimson from her foot, and if she admired distantly the inherent synchronicity of her body, the interconnected systems of flesh and tubing. Was she scared when they killed that deer, when they killed that man? By the time Henry pushed Bunny off the edge of the ravine, she must have been used to it, the slow careen of a body towards the ground. I think about the parts of the story that we don’t know because Richard didn't know and never tried to find out. (Did Donna know? I struggle to draw the line between author and narrator, desperate to give her the benefit of the doubt for being a woman, for surely knowing what it’s like, though I can also admit that these old habits can suffer long, drawn-out deaths and I see this in my own work, in the characters and artists I love.) But still — had they all kissed her, one by one, like an offering passed around? Had I once wanted to be that girl, too, as if I could have been that girl? This was a position I coveted because I understood, vaguely, the power it would have given me. This is the only power a girl can have in a story like this, the power that comes from a beautiful thing corrupted by a force so terrible and inevitable as male sexuality: Dolores Haze and Laura Palmer whose traumas outlived them, Cassie Ainsworth who kept trying to die for love. Camilla Macaulay and Beverly Marsh who could not escape the violence they were prescribed, who mingled with their respective groups of boys in a way that suggested an otherworldliness to their sexuality, ‘this essential human link between the world and the infinite,’ their sole source of strength. This was the ultimate defining feature of girlness: beyond her appearance and enigmatic personality, she was a girl because a man said so.

“Let’s get married,” said Richard. Did she laugh, sometimes, to think that her whole life had been a yearning? In between the pages of that book I love so much did Camilla Macaulay ever look into the mirror and see nothing reflected back, a vacant room filled with stale cigarette smoke and empty bottles of Scotch? Let’s get married, he said, but what he meant was that she was a balm to a wound that couldn’t heal, the dark shadowy crack down a life that wasn’t hers. “Milly, my girl,” said Charles, and there she was, yes, a girl, standing barefoot with a glass of watered-down gin in her trembling hand, she was a girl the way none of us who live outside the printed type of a novel, who live beyond the confines of a television screen, can ever be: wholly and holy. 

“Camilla, I love you,” said Richard. “Let’s get married…I could help you.”

How am I supposed to believe that Camilla loved Henry when there was nothing to indicate that Camilla herself was capable of anything beyond the infinite mystery of her smile? She was a bramble rose, a queen to a suit of dark jacks and king and joker, a wisp of silk, light as a feather, still a girl, a slight lovely girl and never a person, no, never more than a girl whose hair smelled of hyacinth.

I wish she had tilted her head so he could see the marbled scar at her temple where the hair still struggled to grow. I wish she had spat in his eye. “I don’t want you to help me,” she replied. This was the end she got, half-goodbye, half-apology, a long look backwards from the window of a train or a car. What I wouldn’t have done for the chance — just once! — to turn away from someone as he waited for me on the edge of a train station platform or a curb, watching as I went. 


End file.
